Saturday, 21 July 2012

Iraq - the US version of Soviet Afgan War?

Iraq - the US version of Soviet Afgan War?

I studied up a little on the Soviet Afgan war that took place from 1979 to
1988. Almost 10 years and they lost 14,000 soldiers with 10,000 seriously
injured and 415,000 which got sick from bad conditions. These numbers seem close
to ours. We have almost 4,000 dead but probably more so if you consider those
that died from natural conditions, accident, and suicide. Also, they had far
less seriously wounded, we have more. Remember, I am comparing 1/2 of the Soviet
war to the US-Iraq war over the past 5 years. The conditions are better for our
soldiers but they are estimating that tens of thousands will suffer from PTSD in
the future.
It seems our troop rotation might be on a longer period as the Soviets had
over 600,000 troops over the 9 year period. I don't remember the exact number
but I think the US has sent about 400,000 troops over to the area over the past
5 years.
Lastly, the Soviets never had more than 105,000 troops occupying one country.
We currently have 180,000 spread all over the place.
The thinking by those in agreement with war is that if we don't attack them,
someone else will. That someone else will then get the oil. Vacuums in power and
resources available will always exist, why shouldn't the US take advantage of
those vacuums to set ourselves up to keep power?
The other side says that we should simply get away from oil as a natural
resource. As the old saying goes, if the oil were broccoli, there would be no
war there.
One big issue is the gobs of money that is going into this war - on a huge
national credit card. This fact is not brought to our attention because we are
not paying the costs through increased revenues such as taxes. Heck, we haven't
even been billed or invoiced yet. So we really don't know how much this war
costs as it is not a line item in our national budget. It really should be,
don't you think?
The other issue is the veterans that will have mental health problems, lack
of jobs, and lack of medical care and support with our dwindling budget. This
new Vietnam will give us homeless veterans, some of which might be a danger to
themselves and others. We haven't even seen these people because they are still
serving oversees or getting some treatment at this time. Once the country starts
going bankrupt and pulling out of the middle east, we will then see these folks
cast aside in huge numbers.
The final issue is that war can cause countries to literally go bankrupt. The
Soviet Union has never recovered from fighting one country. How will this end
for a country, like the US, waging wars against multiple countries?